Digi Yatra set to spread wings: Makeover plan includes hassle-free access to public places, hotel check-ins

DYF is also in talks with various stakeholders to ensure automated border control practices for departure and arrival immigration.

Digi Yatra is set to spread wings and will be available for international travellers before the end of 2025. That’s not all. The makeover plan includes using the app for hotel check-ins and hassle-free access to public places.

To enable the facility for foreign travellers, Digi Yatra Foundation (DYF), a non-profit organisation working on the project, will create e-passport verifiable credentials by integrating the soon-to-be-launched chip-enabled e-passports into the app. At present, it is prototype testing the e-passport-based enrollment. “We are eagerly waiting for the rollout of electronic passports in India to fast-track things at our end,” Suresh Khadakbhavi, CEO, DYF, said during an interaction with FE.

DYF is also in talks with various stakeholders to ensure automated border control practices for departure and arrival immigration. “This will enable automated immigration clearances upon arrival and departure, eliminating the need for physical passport verification and saving more than an hour’s time for the passengers,” Khadakbhavi said.

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He cites an example. “If you are flying from Bengaluru to Frankfurt, you would share your credentials with Bengaluru officials using the app. Then you go through the seamless process. Once you land in Frankfurt, the immigration authorities there will have already received your credentials. And now instead of waiting for two hours, you can go through automated border control, scan your passport, match the face and go.”

DYF, which is co-owned by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and private airports, also plans to align with IATA One-ID, for global interoperability. It is an initiative by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), representing around 320 airlines in over 120 countries, to streamline passenger journeys with advanced sharing of information and a contactless process at the airport based on biometric-enabled identification.

Many European countries are also testing out digital travel. Last year, Finland launched the world’s first digital travel document pilot programme at Helsinki Airport. Croatia, the Netherlands and Canada are also experimenting with the concept.

The biometric boarding system that uses facial recognition technology for verification at Indian airports last month had an upgrade in its backend system, and users were asked to install the new app. While there was speculation that the week-long outage and the launch of a new app were because of a potential data breach, DYF says it was done to prepare for the upcoming expansion to 13 more airports besides the 15 airports where the facility is already available.

The upgrade, it says, is also a backend preparation to extend the Digi Yatra benefits to foreign travel by 2025, among other features such as seamless hotel check-ins, public places access, a chatbot, among others.

Additionally, it is also a preparation for becoming a global transit hub. “India wants to have global hubs and Digi Yatra’s international feature aims to facilitate the same. If you look at West Asia, they have two or three hubs. The reason they are global hubs is because passengers can easily go through the whole transfer process, without any hassle,” he said.

“Of course, this is just the start of the story and there are other aspects like connectivity, shopping experience, etc. But if you make the passenger process efficient, rest can follow and it will become an efficient hub,” he added.

Further, the decentralised mobile-based ID storage platform is designed for air travellers to securely store their IDs and travel documents. And, that is why Khadakbhavi claims it’s a safer option for hotel check-ins, a feature that is also in the pipeline.

Explaining it further, he said, “You fly from Frankfurt to Bengaluru, you have landed and checked into the hotel. As of now, they will tell you to show them your passport, they will take a photocopy for their records. Here, your details are like an encrypted document that is available to multiple people because it is stored in some file. Or, even if you show your file on your phone, it gets scanned and saved.” Once Digi Yatra brings in this feature, a traveller has to be validated with her or his face and it will give a green check, which is the only thing the hotel would need.

By September this year, the team plans to launch a chatbot for text, voice and video support, query response and bot-guided enrolment. Additionally, a guardianship feature has also been implemented, with which parents can enable kids to be enrolled with their apps. “However, international process might take some time because it needs a lot of deliberation with the Bureau of Immigration and other authorities,” he said. The team also plans to add public place entry such as stadiums by next year.

Another much more futuristic feature that DYF is looking at is a fully homomorphic encryption. This is a technology that can unlock the value of data on untrusted domains without needing to decrypt it. This means that if you share your credential to a verifier, it’s a one-way encryption, ie, they can use it once and nobody else can open that data.

Talking about data security and the data leak controversy after its former vendor Dataevolve Solutions came under investigation, he said, “There is no central storage of the information shared on Digi Yatra. Even the foundation has no access to data. It is purged from the system after 24 hours of departure of flight. Only the passenger has full control over it.” The Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem claims to use standards or protocols such as the World Wide Web Consortium, Self Sovereign Identity, Verifiable Credentials, Decentralised Identifiers, Trust layer on a Distributed Ledger (Hyperledger Aries Golang) and Secure Wallets and public-private key pairs to ensure privacy and for data protection.

The foundation believes that while manual processes will still be available, the safety features will bring in more takers for facial recognition technology-based travel.